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Lessons from Chicago, written in blood: Keenan

A recent report from Chicago in the New York Times provided a relentlessly grim window on a city where gun violence has “become the terrifying norm.”

A team of reporters spent the Memorial Day long weekend documenting every shooting in Chicago, a weekend in which 64 people were shot, six of them killed. It was just a three-day glimpse of a year in which, so far, 1,607 people have been shot in just over five months. A local website has crunched the numbers to show this represents one person shot in the Windy City every two hours and 22 minutes.

Those sad, scary numbers — and the human agony documented by Times reporters that keeps those statistics from numbing the real pain they represent — offer a bracing, clarifying perspective on Toronto’s own recent spike in gun crime. Because Chicago is not Detroit, a city gutted by hard economic times and once deserted by its middle class; nor is it Rio de Janeiro or Bogota, cities in post-colonial, developing countries whose economies have been dominated by the international illegal drug trade.

In fact, Chicago is much like Toronto: an affluent, often celebrated Great Lakes city known for long-suffering sports fans, one that is an economic, political and tourism powerhouse in its region. In fact, from time to time, whether we’re talking about waterfront revitalization or architecture or economic development, Chicago is cited as a city we can learn from. (It is, after all, one of only two cities to which former mayor Rob Ford led trade missions.)

Toronto has been becoming, in many ways, more like Chicago, from the size of its population to the density of skyscrapers, to the racial geographic sorting.

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It’s this similarity that ought to make us look at the gun violence in Chicago as a cautionary tale and ask what we can learn from its example to avoid finding ourselves in its situation. There may be an impulse to take solace in a story like this, which shows that even in a period where we are worrying about our worst gun crime rate in years, similarly sized Chicago has had 8.5 times more murders. To smugly conclude we have no real problem at all, by comparison.

We have gun control in Canada, and Toronto remains, after all, among the very safest large cities in the world to live. Certainly we should count our blessings that we are relatively safe, but I think that would be the wrong conclusion to draw, if we go no further.

Because the detailed reporting gives a glimpse into a situation that is all too easy to imagine here: A cycle of revenge among gang members that leads to an arms race, making carrying guns ever more common. Pockets of a racially stratified city in which young people see gangs as a rung on a ladder out of poverty — “an inspiration,” as one former member put it, as a way to make a “little money,” and “just to be part of something, man.” A mistrust of police among the general public that grows so profound people refuse to co-operate — even driving themselves to the hospital after being shot, rather than calling authorities — leaving a police force technologically hyper-equipped but unable to stop crimes they all but know are going to happen.

We are not there, in Toronto, but there are some trends in all these areas that point in the same direction.

But perhaps more importantly, we cannot take comfort in the comparison because we have our own stories to look at, and they are heartbreaking:

Candice Rochelle Bobb, a pregnant mother shot and killed last month (her infant child delivered by C-section as she died, before dying weeks later) on the same block where, less than a year earlier, 14-year-old Lecent Ross died from a gunshot wound while visiting a 10-year-old neighbour. A 10-year-old boy struck by a bullet while watching television in his own home. Cynthia Mullapudi, a recent university graduate and hospital volunteer, gunned down in the back seat of a car driven by a man she had just met through a mutual friend.

Each of these — each of Toronto’s 32 homicides in all forms this year, and each of Toronto’s 83 people injured or killed by guns this year — is a horrible, sad story, and the stories of those victims defy consolation. If gun crime in Chicago has become the terrifying norm, in Toronto it is equally terrifying, and far from the norm.

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The news of each death stuns us, as it should: the appropriate reaction to murder is shock. Among the saddest parts of the Times piece is the depiction of people carrying on their daily drudgery amid the spent bullet casings — the laundromat that does not close when someone is murdered on its front steps, the people carting dirty clothes and ducking under and around police tape to go about their day.

When the shock wears off, when violence becomes mundane and expected, despair follows. Rather than feeling reassured that this is still rare enough to horrify us, let us be galvanized to make it rarer still. If gun crime remains shocking in Toronto, perhaps there remains a chance we can be shocked into confronting it and preventing its spread.

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